Deploy your React client-side app with Surge

I'm used to using something like Heroku or Digital Ocean to deploy my applications, but I've been recently working on mostly client-side applications that talk to an API. With them being separate from the server you can actually deploy your site 100% statically, which means you can put it on something like Github pages. Github pages doesn't support client-side routing out of the box so I looked into other options. I think it is possible, but thankfully in my search I came across Surge. Surge is a static site deployment service that allows you to deploy any static site in seconds. Literally.

$ npminstall -g surge
$ cd myProject
$ surge

And you're done. Post over. Pretty much.

Another of other thing that surge gives you out the box is collaboration. When you deploy you just add their email:

$ surge --add your.friend@gmail.com

They'll get an email, make an account and now they can deploy to the same yourproject.surge.sh URL as you're deploying to. Pretty sweet!

In my script, I'm also renaming index.html to 200.html so I can take full advantage of client-side routing. If you don't do this, deep linking to http://animedrop.com/2016/summer will go to a 404 page, because the entire site is static. It's trying to look for a /2016/summer.html that doesn't exist so you need to create a 200.html to catch these requests and let them get there client-side.

That's the only gotcha really. You get all of this goodness for free so it really makes a great development/staging server. I look forward to possibly trying out their premium options in the future as they make it so goddamn easy to deploy. Headache averted.